Warning: This week’s column isn’t funny, so if you’re looking for a laugh, maybe turn to the comics and come back next week.
I want to talk about an issue facing my children, and thousands of other adopted kids when they hit their teenage years.
Perhaps the biggest issue that adopted kids face is the feeling that their birth parents abandoned them, literally or metaphysically, by choosing drugs over them, for example.
This hits many of them hard in their teenage years, regardless of how happy they are in their adoptive home. Kids feel angry and unloveable and act out righteously. We’ve been going through that in our house for years.
You can ask our neighbors, who have to listen to the yelling.
Psychologists will tell you that a teenager’s most important job during those years is to form his or her own identity, separate from the parents. Typically, a kid looks to his parents for inspiration, then models a new identity similar to theirs – or opposite of theirs – depending on the circumstances.
But what if a child’s birth parents are drug addicts? Or in prison? Yes, they live happily with adoptive parents, who don’t look like them and don’t share any of their DNA, but that doesn’t help much with their identity crisis, when they try to sort out who they are.
This is made more difficult by their classmates, who ask charming questions like, “Why didn’t your mom want you? Why don’t you have a dad? Why did your mom abandon you?”
In the adopted child’s mind, she was abandoned, because her birth mom preferred to continue using drugs to parenting her.
And she has no easy explanations when classmates ask these crass questions.
This is the age when adoptive kids are most likely to become angry – yet they don’t always even know what they’re angry about.
Everyone around them knows something’s going on when the teen starts thrashing around, yelling, withdrawing, becomes depressed, when school grades plummet and other forms of acting out start happening.
This is a hard time for adoptive parents, who worry obsessively and become exhausted by all the drama and stress.
It’s awful to feel helpless to guide your child and steer him in the right direction when he seems determined to self-destruct.
There have been times over the past few years when I would sit down with Cheetah Boy and say, “Why do you keep sabotaging yourself? The path you’re going down leads nowhere. Yet you won’t turn around.”
I read book after book and visited therapist after therapist looking for answers to help my kids, who were obviously suffering.
One thing you quickly learn as the parent of a teenager is – you can’t stop your kid from doing whatever he wants. You can discourage him. You can punish him. But he will find a way to do as he pleases, regardless of what you say. If you disagree with this, then you’re being duped.
After what seemed like eons of yelling and disruption in our household, I finally learned that I could effect some change – by changing myself.
I stopped yelling. I stopped being passive aggressive. I stopped grounding.
One of the books I read, “Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy,” recommends treating teenagers as if they were mental patients. Because their brains are so undeveloped as to be positively psycho. The author advises parents to go out of their way to be kind to their children and understand that they aren’t acting out to punish them, even if it seems that way.
I decided to start being kind, as I would if I visited someone in the hospital.
When my son was doing something of which I disapproved, I sat him down and talked to him about it. Not lectured. Not reproved. Just talked.
I explained why I thought his actions would not lead to his future happiness and success. I asked him what he thought. Usually, he agreed.
I told him I was worried and asked him to consider his future, not just the present.
And sometimes, when he was being particularly annoying, I asked him what was going on with him. Why he was so upset. In the past, I would have just griped at him to cut it out and improve his attitude.
Now, I was actually asking him what was going on. He didn’t always tell me. But sometimes he did.
And it started working.
He turned 18 back in February – a big date for former foster kids. That’s the age foster children “age out” of the system, and their foster parents no longer get paid to care for them.
Many kids have no safety net, being alienated from any birth family that still exists intact and having been moved around enough to lack permanent friends who might take them in.
If they aren’t lucky enough to find a college program to help them, these kids often end up homeless or in jail.
A friend of mine who aged out of the system told me he and his brother ended up in a weird religious cult because they were the only ones willing to take them in.
My son and I had conflicts over what it meant for him to turn 18 and how much liberty he should be allowed, just like average parents and kids.
But it also triggered something in him connected to his past. For the first time, he wanted to seek out his birth mother and father and get some answers as to why they didn’t care for him as they should have.
Since I adopted him at age 5, he’d always steadfastly refused to talk about anything in his past, or to have any contact with his birth family.
I always thought it would be healing for him, because I know his birth mom is remorseful about how her drug addiction hurt her kids and would like the chance to tell him so, but he always refused to talk to her.
Suddenly, now he does want to see her and get answers to his questions. And he also wants to talk to his birth father, who is in prison for a long time.
A few weeks ago, I helped him write a terse letter to his birth father, whom he last saw when he was 4 years old. He told him he didn’t know if he remembered him, but he was his son and had some questions for him. So please put him on his visitors list.
To visit someone in state prison, the inmate must sign a visitation form and send it to you, after which you fill it out and mail it back in. Then you wait for permission from the state.
We waited to see if the dad would respond.
And the letter came a few days ago.
“I never forgot about you,” the letter read, in part. “I always wondered if you forgot about me. … There’s a lot I want to say to you, but I’m emotional right now. I love you, son, and I hope to see you soon …”
I’m getting a little teary eyed just writing these words. I’m hoping that the prison bureaucracy will soon approve our visit so we can go up and see him. And Cheetah Boy can get the answers he seeks.
Meanwhile, he and I are getting along better than we have in a long time. He apologized for being a (expletive deleted) to me during the worst of our arguments. And for other incidents I won’t repeat here.
It’s making me think I might live through this whole teenage thing.
Meanwhile, his 16-year-old sister, who was always the sunny, funny, friendly, academically gifted one with the good grades is doing her own version of acting out. I always hoped she’d get a scholarship to a top university. But that’s not going to happen now.
It’s looking like she’ll be joining her brother in community college, which is fine, just not what I was hoping for.
This time around, I hope I’ve learned enough to do a little less yelling and a little more understanding.
Contact the writer: 714-796-7994 or mfisher@ocregister.com
